Father says Stoughton schools have let him and his son down

Friday

The 14-year-old student says he is the target of anti-Semitic harassment.

STOUGHTON — After years of bullying at the local middle school, Brady Yanoff thought high school would offer a fresh start.

But within his first month at Stoughton High School, Yanoff, age 14, found himself to be the target of anti-Semitic harassment yet again.

News of an “offensive anti-Semitic gesture” spread through town Tuesday afternoon after Principal Juliette Miller released a statement briefly describing Stoughton’s most recent outbreak of Nazi-related harassment.

Yanoff, who is Jewish, said the incident took place in the cafeteria.

After eating lunch with a friend, he went to speak with a classmate about a Snapchat that made him laugh.

A student he didn’t know intercepted him and said, “Heil Hitler,” in reference to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“I just kind of was stonefaced,” recalled Yanoff. “He just walked up right next to me and said it and sat back down and started making the gestures.”

The gestures were Nazi salutes, according to Yanoff, performed by extending one’s arm into the air with a straightened hand.

In Miller’s statement, she said “a student or students may have encouraged another classmate” to make the comment and gesture. Yanoff confirmed that the student who made the gesture has claimed it was part of a dare.

Yanoff said classmates told him the next day that the student who made the gesture is also Jewish. He said learning that did not change his feelings about reporting the incident.

Yanoff’s father, Randy, said the school told him the student who made the Nazi salutes has been suspended. The school also notified the Police Department’s school resource officer about the incident, though police would not comment on whether they are investigating the incident.

But the Yanoffs are skeptical that the town will give Brady justice. In their eyes, the school administration has failed them at every turn when it comes to disciplining Brady’s bullies.

Brady Yanoff described an incident where he was beaten by a classmate who had previously sent him a message calling for the killing of all Jews. Yanoff’s father said his son was hospitalized with a concussion as a result of the beating, but the two children have since reconciled.

Yanoff’s father said the school resource officer did not classify the incident as a hate crime because there was no one who could corroborate his son’s claims of anti-Semitism. The incident did not take place on school grounds.

“It’s not even just me being bullied for my religion,” Yanoff told The Enterprise. “I’ve been bullied about my weight. And honestly people have been saying things about gayness to me because my older brother is gay.”

Yanoff has also received text messages from classmates who encouraged him to kill himself.

Yanoff’s father said his son has been hospitalized twice following suicide attempts, the first of which took place while Yanoff was a seventh-grader.

Yanoff missed more than 100 days of class in seventh and eighth grades. Yanoff said he stopped attending “because I didn’t want to get harassed or attacked anymore.”

Last spring, Yanoff’s father requested that Stoughton pay for his son’s transfer to a private, therapeutic school, which he could not afford to pay for on his own. Randy, who said he is raising Yanoff as a single father, does not work a full-time job.

According to Yanoff’s father, the school district “retaliated” by filing an application with the state for a CRA — short for “Child Requiring Assistance”-- which could have forced Yanoff out of the custody of his father if he continued missing school.

“With the threatening of taking the kid out of the home -- the only place he feels safe -- he was freaking out in school,” said Randy Yanoff. “They couldn’t handle him.”

Superintendent Marguerite Rizzi could not be reached on Thursday afternoon or evening to confirm or deny the CRA filing, which allegedly took place while Yanoff was an eighth-grader.

Rizzi had previously come under fire for her administration’s response to an anti-Semitic incident that took place at Stoughton High School in November 2016. The incident did not involve Yanoff.

In the week leading up to Thanksgiving, a student used tape to make a swastika while decorating the halls, then made a comment regarding Adolf Hitler’s killing of Jews during the Holocaust after he was asked to take it down. The same day, another student used a swastika in a group chat outside of school that involved more than a dozen students.

Both students were given six-day, out-of-school suspensions. Two teachers also received letters of reprimand for discussing the incident with students, one of which was later rescinded.

A third teacher, Hilary Moll, was suspended for 20 days for talking to one student, her colleagues and rescinding a college letter of recommendation for the student who made the swastika out of tape.

The school did not notify parents of either swastika-related incident until January 2017, when the local teachers union spoke out publicly against the administration’s punishment of the three teachers.

“What is a Jewish person supposed to think when you attack the teachers and the people who were defending the victims?” Randy Yanoff told The Enterprise.

Anti-Semitic and Nazi-related incidents continued to occur at the high school, despite the administration’s efforts to curb harassment by collaborating with the Anti-Defamation League on a peer training program that provides anti-bias education to students.

Two additional incidents were publicized in February 2017, one involving a high school student who stood up and made a gesture in reference to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and another where a younger middle school student directed anti-Semitic comments toward one of Yanoff’s Jewish classmates.

In October 2017, Principal Miller wrote in an e-mail to the high school community that a student had digitally drawn a swastika while working on a group project with some of his peers to design a flag.

Cumulatively, Yanoff said the pattern of anti-Semitism has damaged his relationship with his own religion.

“It’s gotten so bad that I don’t even want to have a bar mitzvah,” he said in reference to the coming-of-age ceremony where Jews read the Torah before their congregation. “It’s supposed to happen when you turn 13 -- I’m almost 15 and I don’t want to have one.”

Going forward, Yanoff said he is trying to make positive changes in his life. He has begun working out in his father’s exercise room. He’s also trying to eat healthier, and focus on coursework for math, his favorite subject.

“I’m going to try to keep going,” said Yanoff. “I’m not going to let this deter me, but definitely it’s going to have a toll on my psyche.”